Pricing - Helen Forsyth, Fractional CCO
The honest version, with my actual numbers in it: what a UK fractional Chief Commercial Officer costs, what drives the figure up or down, what you are and are not paying for, and how the total compares with hiring the same seniority full-time.
The short answer
My fractional CCO retainers start at £1,800 per month and scale with the business need and the time required. Every engagement is quoted on the work in front of it, not against a published package.
I work outside IR35, so the retainer is the whole cost. There is no employer National Insurance, no pension contribution, no holiday or sick pay, no benefits, no equity dilution, and no recruitment fee.
For comparison, the same seniority full-time - a Sales Director or VP Sales in the UK - is typically £80,000–£150,000 per year plus OTE, employer NI, pension and benefits, plus a recruitment fee and a three to four month hiring process before anyone speaks to a customer.
Part 01
Search for fractional executive rates and you will find figures that disagree with each other by a factor of five. That is not because anybody is lying. It is because “a day a week” is not a unit of work.
One fractional CCO’s day a week is a strategy review and a board paper. Another’s includes building the Ideal Customer Profile, rewriting the proposition, restructuring the pipeline and personally running the outreach to prove it converts. Those are different jobs at the same nominal time commitment, and no published rate card can distinguish between them.
So the useful question is not “what is the day rate?” It is “what will be different in 90 days, and who is doing the work?” If the answer to the second half is “your team, guided by me,” you are buying advice, and you should price it as advice.
Part 02
Five things move the number, in roughly this order of impact:
What does not move it: your funding round, how urgent the board has decided this is, or how much you have previously paid a consultancy. The fee reflects the work.
Part 03
Scope is agreed per engagement, but this is the shape of it:
Third-party costs are always yours and always visible. I do not mark up media spend or software, because a commercial adviser with a financial interest in one channel is no longer giving you commercial advice.
Part 04
Compare the total commitment, not the headline figure. The retainer and the salary are not equivalent units.
| Fractional CCO | Full-time commercial hire | |
|---|---|---|
| Headline cost | From £1,800 per month, scaled to need | £80,000–£150,000 per year base |
| On top of that | Nothing. The retainer is the cost. | OTE, employer NI, pension, benefits, equity |
| Recruitment cost | None | Typically 15–25% of first-year salary |
| Time to first customer conversation | Days | Three to four months of hiring, then onboarding |
| Notice and exit | Short, contractual | Notice period, possible settlement, re-hire cost |
| If the commercial direction turns out wrong | You change it. Cost is proportionate and reversible. | You have built a team around a strategy that does not work |
| What you are buying | Senior commercial architecture, built and proven, then handed over | Permanent capacity to run a commercial function that already works |
The last row is the real decision. If your commercial function already works and you need it run at scale, hire full-time - it is the better value. If the foundations are missing or broken, a permanent hire is a bet on a direction nobody has validated yet, and the fractional route lets you validate it first. That argument is set out at length in the first sales hire mistake.
Part 05
I do not write proposals. A proposal takes an hour and most people skip straight to the fee page, so I would rather give you the hour than the document.
After a free 30-minute intro call, I offer a free working session instead. You bring one real problem and we troubleshoot it live. The session is scoped around that problem, so it takes the time it needs rather than a fixed slot.
A proposal only proves my fee model. A working session proves whether I am the right person for the job - or whether I am not. If we both want to proceed afterwards, we agree a 90-day plan with measurable outcomes and the retainer starts. If we do not, you have had free commercial consultancy and saved yourself an expensive hiring mistake.
The same logic applies to packaged tiers. Bronze, silver and gold retainers are priced for the seller’s convenience, and they force the work to fit the package. Quoting on the time the work actually needs is harder to display on a pricing page and considerably more honest.
Part 06
Any pricing conversation should include the alternatives, so here they are.
None of this means fractional is always the right answer. It means the retainer should be compared against the cost of the alternatives rather than against zero.
Part 07
From £1,800 per month, scaled to the business need and the time required. No day-rate timesheets, no minimum-term lock-in beyond the agreed plan.
I am responsible for my own tax, National Insurance and pension, so you carry none of the employment overhead of a senior hire. Easy to onboard, no long-term employment commitment. See the IR35 guide for what that means on your side.
Every engagement starts with an agreed plan containing measurable goals, not a deck full of maybes. You can hold me to it, and if the leading indicators are not moving we change the approach.
The point is to build a commercial foundation that outlasts the engagement, then help you hire the person who runs it. A retainer that never ends is a sign the work is not transferring.
Questions
My retainers start at £1,800 per month and scale with the time and scope the work requires. Published market figures vary enormously because a nominal day a week can mean anything from a strategy review to building and personally running a commercial function - so compare what is being delivered, not the rate.
No. I work on a monthly retainer, because commercial architecture is not delivered in discrete billable days and a day-rate model creates an incentive to log hours rather than finish work. Each project is quoted on the time required to deliver the agreed outcomes.
We agree a 90-day plan at the outset, because building and testing a commercial foundation takes at least that long to show honest results. Beyond that, the arrangement continues monthly for as long as it is useful. There is no multi-year lock-in.
Third-party costs are always yours and always visible: paid media budget, software licences, tooling, and any design, build or content production resource. Recruitment of your permanent commercial hire and extended advisory or non-executive continuation are scoped and quoted separately. I do not mark up media spend or software.
In cash terms, usually much cheaper, because the retainer carries no employer National Insurance, pension, benefits, equity or recruitment fee. But the honest comparison depends on what you need. If your commercial function already works and needs running at scale, a full-time hire is better value. If the foundations are missing, a permanent hire is a bet on an unvalidated direction.
No, and I appreciate that is inconvenient if you are running a formal comparison. I offer a free working session on one real problem instead of the paperwork. It costs you nothing, it takes the time the problem needs, and it tells you far more about whether I can do the job than a document I wrote about myself.
That is the normal shape of it. Most engagements run at one to three days a week, and the fee reflects the time and scope agreed. Foundation-building periods tend to be more intensive and often settle down once the architecture is in place and running.
Book a free 30-minute call, tell me what needs building, and I will tell you what it would take and what it would cost. If the honest answer is that you do not need a fractional CCO, you will hear that instead.
Book a free 30-min callFree · 30 minutes · No pitch, no proposal